Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor whose final lecture inspired millions, died early today in Virginia of pancreatic cancer.

Audioholics has a fun read regarding a recent legal snafu by Monster Cables. As they report it:"Not long ago we reported that Monster Cable had issued a cease and desist letter to Blue Jeans Cable about their Tartan cables. Little did the lawyer drones over at Monster know that Kurt Denke, the president of Blue Jeans was, in a former life, a lawyer by trade. Oops! Someone pushed around the wrong "small" company! While we are no legal experts, we recognize humor when we see it. And this is funny. With Blue Jeans Cable's permission, we've included their full response to Monster's letter below. Kurt wants to keep this entire process completely open to the public and we're more than happy to oblige. Enjoy"

An old hand writes about the current state of affairs in hiring in IT

Many large IT shops -- and not a few small ones -- work like the Dead Sea. New hires are brought in as management deems it necessary. Their qualifications (talent, education, professionalism, experience, skills -- TEPES) will tend to vary quite a bit, depending upon current needs, employee departure, the personnel budget, and the general hiring ability of those doing the hiring. All things being equal, the general competency of the IT department should have roughly the same distribution as the incoming hires. Instead, what happens is that the more talented and effective IT engineers are the ones most likely to leave -- to evaporate, if you will. They are the ones least likely to put up with the frequent stupidities and workplace problems that plague large organizations; they are also the ones most likely to have other opportunities that they can readily move to. What tends to remain behind is the 'residue' -- the least talented and effective IT engineers.

From Page 6 of an interesting 9 page article entitled "Out of the Blue":

the model is so successful that its biggest restrictions are now technological. "We have already shown that the model can scale up," Markram says. "What is holding us back now are the computers." The numbers speak for themselves. Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you'd need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data (peta being a million billion, or 10 to the fifteenth power). That's about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google's servers. (Given current technology, a machine capable of such power would be the size of several football fields.) Energy consumption is another huge problem. The human brain requires about 25 watts of electricity to operate. Markram estimates that simulating the brain on a supercomputer with existing microchips would generate an annual electrical bill of about $3 billion . But if computing speeds continue to develop at their current exponential pace, and energy efficiency improves, Markram believes that he'll be able to model a complete human brain on a single machine in ten years or less.

The telecom company that carries most of Pakistan's traffic, PCCW, has found it necessary to shut Pakistan off from the Internet while they filter out the malicious routes that a Pakistani ISP, PieNet, announced earlier today. Evidently PieNet took this step to enforce a decree from the Pakistani government that ISP's must block access to YouTube because it was a source of blasphemous content. YouTube has announced more granular routes so that at least in the US they supercede the routes announced by PieNet. The rest of the world is still struggling.

A PC designed to be worn around your neck, design by Microsoft. With all of the movie cliches this feeds into, what could possibly go wrong?

Using the new light-weight Microsoft operating system, SLIM, this PC travels with you effortlessly. The projected touch-gesture interface allows you to interact with your software wherever you are without requiring interface peripherals but its wide-coverage 700 MHz WiFi wireless allows both connection to the web and to performance enhancing peripherals.

In a blow to Microsoft Corp., a federal judge granted class-action status to a lawsuit late Friday alleging that Microsoft unjustly enriched itself by promoting PCs as "Windows Vista Capable" even when they could only run a bare-bones version of the operating system, called "Vista Home Basic." During an earlier hearing internal Microsoft e-mails were quoted that appeared to show that employees within Microsoft had misgivings about the "Windows Vista Capable" campaign.

Have you ever thought about working at a place where the main worry is keeping the equipment from getting too cold? An excellent detailed interview with the IT manager of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Getting service is a little tough. They try to maintain at least a year's worth of spare parts. Along with an interesting set of photos

There is no feeling like walking into the office @ 6AM on a Monday only to find out that you have a utility failure and your IT site generator has been running all weekend and will likely run out of fuel before you can get a truck there to re-fill. Servers will go down and heads will roll. This would be known as a Bad Thing(tm) Fortunately there is a solution. The GS5000 is a tiny gadget that will let you know via cellular that your site generator is running, has fuel, has moved from its designated location, and a whole lot more.

It is the opinion of Nyquist Capital that Google has designed and deployed home-grown 10GbE switches as part of a secret internal initiative that was launched when it realized commercial options couldn't meet the cost and power consumption targets required for their data centers. This decision by Google, while small in terms of units purchased, is enormous in terms of the disruptive impact it should have on 10GbE switching equipment providers and their component supply chains. It is as if a MACHO just arrived in the Enterprise networking business and the orbits of the existing satellites have begun to shift without observers knowing why - until now.